Solo Strant is a drifting gunfighter. He doesn’t hire out his gun, but he’s quick to pitch in when he sees someone being taken advantage of or an innocent person being threatened. As this yarn opens, that’s what happens when a gang of gun-wolves attacks a small ranch. Solo rides to the rescue, but as it turns out, he may not have done the right thing after all, since it looks like the rancher he rescued may be a murderer!
That’s the first mistake Solo makes in this story, but it’s not the last one. In fact, he seems uncharacteristically prone to making the wrong decisions. But that may have something to do with the extremely complicated plot Ford comes up with, which deals with a generations-long feud between two ranching families, assorted murders, mistaken identities, and the Haunted Corral, which is not a corral at all but rather an area of badlands where folks go in, but they seldom come out alive. The whole “shadow of the past” element in this novelette reminds me of many of Walt Coburn’s novels and stories.
“Feud of the Haunted Corral” is a fast-moving, entertaining story. Solo Strant is a likable protagonist, and I’ve enjoyed every story I’ve read about him. It’s pretty easy to spot the evil mastermind in this one, but that doesn’t take away from the pleasure of reading it. My thanks to Cullen for making that possible.
Elsewhere in this issue are stories by a number of WILD WEST WEEKLY stalwarts. Norman W. Hay, writing under the house-name William A. Todd, contributes a Risky McKee yarn. (All the Risky McKee stories are by Hay, and while William A. Todd is considered a house-name, it’s possible Hay wrote everything under that by-line. We’ll probably never know for sure.) There’s a Calamity Boggs story by Lee Bond. Guy L. Maynard pitches in with a Reckless Blaine story. (There are six Reckless Blaine stories, published in six consecutive issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY. I’d be surprised if Maynard didn’t cobble them together into a fix-up novel, but if he did, I can’t find any record of it.) J. Allan Dunn, Charles M. Martin, and Carl Raht contribute stand-alone stories. This appears to be a very good issue of one of my favorite Western pulps.
John Standon, the hero of this one, is an American adventurer who has been prospecting in the mountains of Mexico for several years. As the story opens, he’s on his way back to Texas, having given up on finding gold. Before he can cross the border, though, he finds himself caught up in a revolution as he helps rescue some aristocrats from a gang of bandits led by a self-styled revolutionary who’s really just after loot and power.
Standon’s efforts to help these people escape from the bandits is really all this books amounts to. The plot is very simple. But there’s a ton of action, the characters are colorful and interesting, the bandit leader and his second-in-command, an American gunslinger, are suitably villainous, and McCulley plays out the whole thing in exciting, fast-paced prose. While the style is slightly old-fashioned now and then, for the most part you wouldn’t guess that this novel was written and published more than a hundred years ago.
My copy also has the names of a couple of previous owners written in it. So I have to thank Howard D. Lindamood of Atkins, Virginia, and Slaylin M. Kittredge, address unknown, for passing along this book until it finally wound up in my hands. Because I really enjoyed JOHN STANDON OF TEXAS. If you’re a Johnston McCulley fan or just enjoy good adventure novels, it’s worth reading.
That novella features Pete Rice, and that’s the reason I read this one. A
little background for those of you unfamiliar with the character: Inspired by
the success of THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, in 1933 the good folks at Street
& Smith decided to launch a Western hero pulp. The result was PETE RICE
MAGAZINE. The title character is the two-fisted, fast-shootin’ sheriff of
Trinchera County, Arizona, who's assisted by two deputies, scrawny little
Misery Hicks (who does double duty as the barber of Buffalo Gap, the county
seat) and Teeny Butler, who, in keeping with the nicknaming tradition of pulp
characters, is well over six feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. The gimmick of
the series, if you can call it that, is that while it has all the Western
trappings, it’s set in the modern day, putting it in firmly in the same camp as
the Western B-movies of the times starring Gene Autry and others. These Pete
Rice novels, and they were full-length novels, were written by veteran pulpster
Ben Conlon under the pseudonym Austin Gridley.
Well, PETE RICE MAGAZINE was not a raging success. It ran for 31 issues,
approximately two and a half years. I read one of the novels years ago and
don’t remember much about it except that I wasn’t impressed and didn’t seek out
any more of the series. But . . . after Pete’s own magazine was cancelled, the
character moved to WILD WEST WEEKLY, where he starred in 21 more novellas and
novelettes. Or did he? You see, the stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY are no longer
set in the modern day but take place in the Old West, which prompted a recent
discussion between me and a friend about the idea that the Pete Rice in the
WILD WEST WEEKLY stories is actually the father or grandfather of the Pete Rice
who starred in his own magazine. That seems feasible, other than the fact that
in WILD WEST WEEKLY, Misery and Teeny are still Pete’s deputies, and claiming
that those characters are also an earlier generation seems like quite a stretch
to me. I suspect that in real life, nobody at Street & Smith ever gave the
change in time period a second thought other than maybe instructing Conlon to
make the stories actual Westerns in hopes that they would help sell WILD WEST
WEEKLY. It’s a safe bet that none of the pulp writers and editors dreamed
anybody would still be talking about this stuff nearly a century down the road!
Anyway, another difference in the characters in PETE RICE MAGAZINE and WILD
WEST WEEKLY is that in the later incarnation, Austin Gridley became a
house-name. Ben Conlon continued to write some of the stories, but other
authors contributed Pete Rice yarns, too, including Paul S. Powers, who teamed
Pete with his popular character Sonny Tabor, leading to a joint byline of
Austin Gridley and Ward Stevens (Powers’ pseudonym); Ronald Oliphant, who
penned a crossover between Pete and Billy West of the Circle J, under the names
Austin Gridley and Cleve Endicott (the house-name on the Circle J series); Lee
Bond; and the extremely prolific Laurence Donovan, who also ghosted some Doc
Savage novels for Street & Smith. The Pete Rice story in this issue of WILD
WEST WEEKLY I just read, “The Cougar’s Claws”, is Donovan’s first Pete Rice
story.
And after my lukewarm at best reaction to the other Pete Rice yarn I read, I
was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really enjoyed this one. The Cougar
is the leader of an outlaw gang plaguing Trinchera County and has come up with
a really grisly way of disposing of his enemies: he wraps them in green
bullhide and then lets the sun dry it out so that it shrinks and crushes the
victims to death. Pete and his deputies clash several times with the Cougar and
his gang, escape from some death traps, and finally expose the real mastermind
behind all the villainy. There are some clever twists and Donovan was always
really good with action, of which there is plenty. I found Pete and his
deputies likable and had a fine time reading this novella. I’ll be on the
lookout for more of the Pete Rice issues of WILD WEST WEEKLY.
I think the novelette “Gunsmoke Tornado” is the earliest story I’ve ever read
by Dudley Dean McGaughey, the real name of Dean Owen, who gets the credit for
this one. I’ve read quite a few of McGaughey’s pulp novels from the Forties and
a bunch of paperbacks from the Fifties and Sixties, but “Gunsmoke Tornado” was
only his ninth published story. It’s a good one, too, about a drifting young
cowhand who signs on with a ranch crew where he faces some hazing. That might
have been a story in itself, but there’s more going on than that, and before
you know it, our young hero finds himself in danger up to his neck because of a
feud between rival ranches. McGaughey’s work has a nice hardboiled tone to it
and this story is no exception. Plenty
of tough action makes this one a winner.
I’m familiar with Lee Bond mostly from the long-running Long Sam Littlejohn
series he wrote as backup stories in TEXAS RANGERS, but he did several series
for WILD WEST WEEKLY, including one featuring drifting cowpokes Calamity Boggs
and Shorty Stevens. Shorty is, well, short and feisty, just as you’d expect.
Calamity is tall and husky and full of doom and gloom, an extreme pessimist who
always believes the worst is about to happen, which is, I’m sure, how he got
his nickname. Bond doesn’t explain that in “Calamity Hubs a Frame-Up” in this
issue, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s easy enough to just jump right into
this yarn in which our two rambling heroes find a recently abandoned line
shack, decide to spend the night there, and wake up the next morning to find
themselves the prisoners of a posse out to hang them for murder and rustling.
As you might suppose, eventually they sort things out and everything gets
resolved in a big gunfight, as things usually do in a Lee Bond story. Bond
moves things along well and was always excellent when it comes to the action
scenes. This is the third very good story in a row in this issue.
I’ve written here before about how Elmer Kelton and I enjoyed talking about
Western pulps whenever we’d get together. I think I may have been the only one
of his friends who was a pulp fan. He told me several times that WILD WEST
WEEKLY was his favorite pulp when he was a kid growing up on a ranch in West
Texas, and Sonny Tabor was his favorite character. Paul S. Powers wrote the
Sonny Tabor series under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens. More than 130 novelettes
and novellas between 1930 and 1943 is quite a run. Some of those stories were
crossovers featuring Sonny Tabor meeting up with other series characters from
WILD WEST WEEKLY, including Kid Wolf (also a Paul S. Powers creation), Pete
Rice, and Billy West and the Circle J outfit.
But who was Sonny Tabor? He was a good-guy outlaw, falsely accused of some
crime (I don’t know the details) and on the run from the law, blamed for every
bit of outlawry that occurs any time he’s around, and sometimes even when he’s
not. The novelette in this issue, “A Murder Brand for Sonny Tabor”, is actually
the first one I’ve read. The youngest of three brothers who own a ranch
together is gunned down, shot in the back, and the name Tabor is carved into
his forehead. The dead man’s brothers and the local law blame Sonny, of course,
and he has to uncover the real killer to clear his name of this charge, anyway,
although he’ll still be wanted for dozens of others. This is a really well-written
story and I found myself liking Sonny and rooting for him right away. I have
quite a few more issues with Sonny Tabor stories in them and I’m glad of that
because I really enjoyed this one.
I was familiar with Allan R. Bosworth as the author of several excellent
Western novels, but I’ve discovered in recent years that he also wrote scores
of stories in WILD WEST WEEKLY under house-names, as well as contributing to
the magazine under his own name. He used it on his long-running series about
freight wagon driver Shorty Masters and his sidekick Willie Wetherbee, also
known as the gunfightin’ Sonora Kid. In “A Hangin’ on Live Oak Creek”, all
Shorty and Willie want to do is run a trotline and catch themselves a mess of
catfish for fryin’ up. Instead, they find a fella who’s been lynched, but
luckily they come across him before he’s choked to death. Rescuing him puts our
heroes smack-dab in the middle of a fight between ranchers and rustlers. There’s
a nice twist in this one. I saw it coming, but that didn’t make it any less
satisfying. Also, I like the way Shorty names the mules in his team after
classical music composers. That’s a nice touch I wasn’t expecting. Another
really good story.
One of WILD WEST WEEKLY’s specialties was the series of linked novellas that
could then be combined and published as a fix-up novel. Walker A. Tompkins was
the master of this format, writing many of them for the pulp. His story in this
issue published under the house-name Philip F. Deere, “Death Rides Tombstone Trail”, is the third of six to feature a Wyoming
cowboy named Lon Cole who is in Texas working as a trail boss and also getting
mixed up in various adventures. In this one, he’s between trail drives and
takes a job as a special guard for a stagecoach carrying a shipment of gold. Of
course, the stagecoach is held up. Lon is grazed by an outlaw bullet and
knocked out so they think he’s dead and ride off leaving him there. He goes
after the varmints, of course, and discovers they’re a gang known as the Secret
Six and are led by a mysterious mastermind known as The Chief. This is nothing we
haven’t all seen before, but Tompkins is good at it. Even though the story has
a beginning, middle, and end, it’s weakened slightly by being part of a bigger whole,
but I had a good time reading it anyway. The six Lon Cole stories were combined into the novel THUNDERGUST TRAIL, published under Tompkins' real name by Phoenix Press in 1942. I own a copy of that book but haven't read it. When I get around to it, I'll have already read a chunk out of the middle of it, but I don't think that'll bother me too much.
Overall, this is one of the best Western pulps I’ve read in a long time. Every
story in this issue is very good to excellent, and several of them really make
me want to read more about the characters. If you’ve never read an issue of
WILD WEST WEEKLY, it would make a good introduction to the magazine, I think.
If you’re a long-time fan like me, it’s well worth downloading and reading.
In this issue’s lead novella, “Traitors Ride the Sundown”, Strant is hired to
find out who’s trying to murder a rancher who has a spread in the Sundown
Hills. On the way to take the job, he runs into trouble at an outlaw
roadhouse in Bad Man’s Pass but is helped out by a friendly old-timer who is
headed in the same direction. When Strant reaches his destination, he has to
deal with several bushwhackings and murders before he untangles what’s going
on. There are a couple of occasions where someone is about to give him some
vital information, only to wind up dead. The plot is pretty simple and
straightforward and doesn’t contain any surprises, but I really enjoy the way
Ford writes. His punchy, action-packed style really races along and Solo Strant
is a very likable protagonist. I’ve read several Silver Kid novellas before and
always enjoyed them. “Traitors Ride the Sundown” is also quite entertaining. If
somebody were to reprint this series, I’d certainly be a customer for it. Until
then, I’ll read ’em where I find ’em.
Ben Conlon is best remembered for writing the Pete Rice stories, which appeared
in the character’s own magazine and also in WILD WEST WEEKLY, under the
pseudonym Austin Gridley, but he wrote a couple of hundred Western, sports, and
adventure yarns for various pulps and under various pen-names over the years.
He has a stand-alone story, “Texas Blood”, in this issue under his own name.
It’s about a young former Texas Ranger starting a ranch in New Mexico and
running into rustling trouble. The stereotypical pulp Western dialect is really
thick in this one. Everybody talks that way. My Mangy Polecat Threshold is
higher than most people’s, but Conlon overdoes it to the point that I almost
gave up. I’m glad I didn’t because, other than the dialogue, his writing is
pretty clean and swift and vivid, and the plot has some clever twists leading
to a smashing climax. I wound up enjoying the story quite a bit.
J. Allan Dunn wrote approximately 160 stories for WILD WEST WEEKLY about a
young Texas Ranger named Bud Jones. This issue’s yarn is called “Buckshot and
Bullets” and finds Bud trying to head off a war between Texas cattlemen and
Mexican sheepherders. I nearly always enjoy Dunn’s work, but a couple of things
about this one bothered me, the most troublesome that he seems to think Houston
is the capital of Texas, not Austin. Also, he has all the Texans referring to
the Mexicans as “Mexies”, a term I don’t think I’ve ever heard. That said, this
is a pretty well-written, exciting tale with some nice action. Bud Jones is a
very likable protagonist, too.
The most prolific series of all in WILD WEST WEEKLY starred Billy West, the
young owner of the Circle J ranch in Montana, and his two friends who work for
him, feisty, redheaded Joe Scott and cantankerous old codger Buck Foster, along
with Sing Lo, the ranch’s Chinese cook. Upwards of 450 novelettes starring this
bunch were published between 1927 and 1941, written by half a dozen different
authors under the house-name Cleve Endicott. I’d read a few of them before and
enjoyed them. The story in this issue, “Gun-Fight Valley”, is by Norman L. Hay,
who probably wrote more Circle J
novelettes than anyone else. Our heroes are in Arizona on a cattle-buying trip
when they get drawn into the mystery of a missing wagon train. What they find
turns out to be somewhat unexpected. This is a nicely plotted yarn with plenty
of excellent action. Billy, Joe, and Buck are standard characters but are
handled well and I enjoy reading about their exploits. I’d love to see some of
this series reprinted someday.
Evidently, “Burro Bait” by Phil Squires is part of a humorous series about a
young man from Missouri called Hinges Hollister who goes west to become a
cowboy. The story is told in the form of letters between Hinges and his mother
and girlfriend back home. The dialect is so thick as to be almost indecipherable,
and the humor falls flat. Not to my taste at all, and I didn’t finish it.
The issue wraps up with “Tommy Rockford Bucks the Nevada Wolves” by one of my
favorite Western writers, Walker A. Tompkins. By WILD WEST WEEKLY standards,
the Tommy Rockford series wasn’t that prolific: approximately 50 stories in a
dozen years, 1931-43. But it’s a good one, and Tommy Rockford is one of my
favorite characters from this pulp known for its series characters. He’s a
young railroad detective, and if they had ever made any Tommy Rockford movies,
Roy Rogers would have been perfect to play him. In this yarn, which takes place
in Arizona and Mexico, despite the title, Tommy takes on an outlaw gang that
has traveled from Nevada to Arizona to visit another gang and see their
hideout. This leads to a stagecoach holdup, an attempted bank robbery, and
Tommy being captured by the outlaws. I found this one to be something of a
disappointment because, despite all those plot elements, it never comes
together as a very compelling story. It’s more a case of just throwing things
in the pot until there are enough pages. Even worse, Tommy does something that’s
so out of character, it just about ruined the story for me, and it wasn’t even
necessary to make the plot work. I think it would have been more effective
handling things a different way. The story is readable enough because Tompkins’
prose is always smooth and just races right along, but this is easily the worst
of the Tommy Rockford series I’ve read so far.
So what you have in this issue is definitely a mixed bag. The cover is excellent,
the Silver Kid and Circle J stories are both very good, the Bud Jones story is
flawed but entertaining, the Tommy Rockford story definitely sub-par, the Ben Conlon story okay but with overdone dialect, and the
Hinges Hollister story not for me at all. I still like WILD WEST WEEKLY, but this
is far from my favorite issue. It does make me want to read more Silver Kid and
Circle J stories, though.
Geer published 34 stories in a short career that ran from 1936 to 1943. All but
two of them were published in STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN STORY, so obviously
he found a receptive market there. The two stories published elsewhere were in
WESTERN ADVENTURES, also a Street & Smith pulp, and WESTERN TRAILS from
Ace. His only series character (13 stories) was someone named Potluck Jones. I
haven’t read any of them so I don’t know anything about ol’ Potluck, but I’ll
admit, the name doesn’t make me optimistic. Geer had only four books published,
Western novels in 1936, ’37, and ’39 and then a Potluck Jones novel (probably a
fix-up from some of the pulp stories) published only in England in the early
Forties. I found a Ney Napolean Geer, born in Ohio in 1895 and died in
Washington in 1974, and feel confident this must be the Western pulpster. But
that’s all I was able to come up with about him. Why he stopped writing in 1943
remains a mystery, although it’s possible he could have continued under another
name.
His story in this issue starts with gunman Jim Westover in Nevada looking for
his twin brother Bob. Bob, who is also a hired gun, has signed on with one side
in a range war, but Jim doesn’t know any more details than that. On his way to
the town of Silver Butte, he makes a tragic discovery: the body of his brother,
bushwhacked and murdered. There are several clues to the killer’s identity.
Since they were twins, Jim decides to masquerade as his brother and try to find
out what happened. This puts him in the middle of the range war, of course,
where he clashes with gunnies on both sides and tangles with some rustlers.
The twin gimmick put me off a little at first, but I stuck with the story and
soon got caught up in it. Geer’s writing is smooth and relatively fast-paced.
This novella reminded me of the work of the Glidden brothers, better known as
Luke Short and Peter Dawson. I thought that maybe I’d found another author well
worth looking for . . . and then I got to the ending, which is one of the worst
I’ve ever come across in a Western pulp, totally undramatic, an anticlimax that
left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d read another story by Geer, but I’d be a
little bit leery going into it.
When I was a kid, I loved Jim Kjelgaard’s juvenile novels about dogs but had no
idea he was a pulp writer starting out. He specialized in animal stories, and
despite my fondness for such when I was young, I have a hard time reading
stories like that now. However, I stuck with “Sled Dog Savvy”, Kjelgaard’s
short story in this issue and was glad I did. It’s a Northern about a Husky who’s
stolen from his master by an unscrupulous trapper and the dog’s struggle to survive
and be reunited with the human he loves. It’s a moving, well-written yarn. I
wouldn’t want a steady diet of such stories, but I enjoyed this one.
Cherry Wilson was one of the few female authors who contributed prolifically to
the Western pulps. A couple of others who come to mind are Eli Colter and C.K.
Shaw. The protagonist of Wilson’s story in this issue, “Range of Hate”, has his
hands full trying to prevent a war between cattlemen and nesters while at the
same time trying to prevent a young man he regards as his surrogate son from
turning outlaw. To complicate things, the youngster is the actual son of a
woman he once loved, who chose another man over him. The domestic drama is even
more complex than that, but that’s enough about it. Wilson does a good job of
balancing all those elements and providing a satisfying story, although the
ending is pretty bittersweet. I don’t recall ever reading anything by Wilson
before, but I certainly would again.
Mojave Lloyd is known to be a pseudonym, but as far as I’m aware, nobody had
ever figured out the author’s real identity. I’ve read one or two by him and
haven’t cared much for them. So I wasn’t expecting much when I read “Bottle-Neck
Boomerang”, his story in this issue. I was very pleasantly surprised by this
tale of a Chinese cowboy trying to start his own ranch and being caught between
a couple of range hogs. The protagonist is known as Shanghai Sam. He came to the
United States to study religion but decided to take off for the tall and uncut
and become a cowboy instead. He’s big, burly, and very intelligent, as the clever
plot of this story demonstrates. I don’t know if there are any more Shanghai
Sam stories, but I’d be happy to read there if there were. It should be noted
that some modern readers might be offended by this story, but they really
shouldn’t be. Shanghai Sam is a great protagonist and this is a very
entertaining story.
Russell A. Bankson is one of those vaguely familiar names to me. And it should
be familiar since he wrote hundreds of stories, mostly Westerns, in a career
that stretched from 1915 to 1957. But if I’ve ever read anything by him before,
I don’t remember it. His story in this issue, “Lawman’s Jackpot”, is about a
lawman’s desperate plan to keep from being killed by an outlaw whose younger
brother was killed in a shootout with the protagonist. It’s a well-written
story and generates a decent amount of suspense.
There’s also a serial installment from the novel THE STAGLINE FEUD by Peter
Dawson (Jonathan Glidden). I normally don’t read serial installments in pulps
unless I have all of them, and I read the novel version of this one some twenty
years ago, so I skipped this one and the usual columns and features on guns,
travel, and penpals.
I don’t really know how to rate this issue of STREET & SMITH’S WESTERN
STORY. The short stories are all good but not great. I thought the lead novel
by Ney N. Geer was excellent until I got to the final two pages that just about
ruined it for me. So, was it worth reading? Sure, it’s a Western pulp. I
consider reading them time well spent even when an issue isn’t top-notch. But
as I’ve said before, don’t rush to your shelves to look for this one.
I was somewhat intrigued by Courtney Ryley Cooper because I'd never heard of him. I found this information about him online:
Courtney Ryley Cooper (1886-1940) was an American writer, journalist, circus performer, publicist, and noted crime novelist. Born in Kansas City, he joined the circus at age 16 where he worked first as a clown, eventually working his way up to general manager. After a brief stint as a journalist and as a marine, Cooper turned to writing screenplays, westerns, and crime novels in the 1920s and 1930s. He achieved moderate success with his crime novels, even earning the admiration of F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, who called him "the best informed man on crime in the U.S." Cooper committed suicide by hanging in a New York hotel room in 1940; persistent rumors suggested his death was actually murder, but no suspects were ever found. Cooper was reportedly investigating German activity in Mexico just prior to his death.
Sounds almost like a pulp character himself. There's a free e-book of one of his Westerns on Amazon. I grabbed it and may even get around to reading it one of these days. We'll see.
